What Was Left Unsaid
by Haleine Delail
Summary: Willow discovers that when she recursed Angel in Season 2, parts of the incantation went unsaid. The ritual was incomplete. What does that mean for Angel's soul? Takes place Season 4, just after Pangs. Please read and review!
1. Chapter 1

_NOTE: I REALIZE THE TIMING IS A LITTLE WONKY HERE, SINCE A DAY OR TWO AFTER ANGEL SHOWED UP IN SUNNYDALE AT THANKSGIVING IN "PANGS," BUFFY WENT TO L.A. TO BAWL HIM OUT. THE WAY I SEE IT, THIS STORY HAPPENS IN BETWEEN THOSE TWO EVENTS, SO WE'LL HAVE TO PRETEND, FOR NOW, THAT ABOUT A WEEK PASSED BETWEEN THANKSGIVING, AND WHEN BUFFY DECIDED TO GO TO L.A. IF THIS SCENARIO HAD TAKEN PLACE, THE __ANGEL__ EPISODE "I WILL REMEMBER YOU" WOULD HAVE GONE VERY DIFFERENTLY!_

_THIS MIGHT NEED SOME STREAMLINING, PARTICULARLY IN SECTIONS 5 &6. LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE ANY SUGGESTIONS._

**PART 1**

The sounds of studying. Pages turning, music sighing, pencils scraping. Buffy snoring.

"Buffy!" Willow yelled from her vantage point at the foot of her dorm-room bed. "Wake up, doofus, or you're going to fail the test tomorrow!"

Buffy groaned sleepily. "Five more minutes."

"No," Willow insisted, "You need to study, you're way behind. And you're drooling on your psych book."

Buffy sat up in her chair and groggily glanced at the clock. She'd been asleep less than ten minutes, but the way she felt right now, it might as well have been ten days. She was having the dreams again, and apparently it didn't matter how short her sleep-time was, her brain was ripe for them now. Knowing that Angel had been in Sunnydale on Thanksgiving, helping her, lurking in the shadows, watching her and waiting had messed with her mind. Even though she hadn't seen him, it had been plenty to plunge her back into _that place,_ the Angel place where nothing was easy and everything was all cryptic dreams and frustrated longing.

Not that the dreams would remain cryptic for long, she knew. It had only been a day and a half. She had learned the hard way that dreams of Angel eventually went two ways: sex and death. Usually one led to the other.

She yawned, and attempted to jump back into the reading, but the text may as well have been written in Etruscan for all the good it was doing her.

"Do you have any instant coffee left, Will?" she asked her friend.

"No, I ran out the other night," Willow answered. "But I've got some of those caffeine pills in my bottom drawer. They're too much for me – they make me spazzy and my hands shake weeks, but your constitution might just be slightly stronger than mine."

"I guess we'll find out," Buffy said, yawning again and crossing the room to Willow's desk.

The bottom drawer was a mishmash of Willowness. A burned copy of Dingoes' music banished out of sight for painful associations. A pair of chicken feet used in temporal fold spells – something Buffy sincerely hoped Willow would never attempt again. Some random computer parts identifiable only by Willow herself, a deck of Tarot cards and some sage in a small Tupperware container. She also had a fake chain-mail costume leftover from her Joan of Arc get-up at Halloween, a high school diploma a little crisp at the corners, a little vial of holy water and of course, a packet of generic brand caffeine tablets. Buffy swallowed two of them with some room-temperature Mr. Pibb, and then returned them to their drawer.

As she did so, she noticed a glass ball in the corner of the drawer, half-covered by the chain-mail. It was about the size of an apple, and had the restless quality of a snowglobe that never quite settles. When Buffy touched it, it began to glow.

"Whoa, what is this thing?" Buffy asked, taking it out of the drawer.

Willow glanced toward her, and saw that Buffy had found Giles' old paperweight.

"A spirit vault for the rituals of the undead," Willow said, reluctantly.

Buffy wrinkled her nose. "Huh?"

"It's an Orb of Thesulah. It's that thing that Giles used to use as a paperweight, that actually has mystical properties. It's used to summon someone's soul from the ether." Willow was uneasy talking about this.

"Ah," Buffy said quietly, as she set the orb noiselessly down on her desk. "Rituals of the undead," she whispered to herself.

Her tone let Willow know that Buffy understood that the Orb had been used to curse Angel for the second time a year and a half ago, just before Buffy had plunged the sword into his gut and sent him to hell. This was not a memory Buffy relished dwelling upon, and Willow knew it. Suddenly, she felt guilt for keeping it around for Buffy to find. These days, she was all too aware of the sting of those little reminders of lost love.

"I just kept it around in case, you know... there's ever a soul-summoning thing again, and, you never know. It may be capable of conducting other types of mystical energy too."

"It's okay Will," Buffy assured her. "I'm just sort of in a wig right now because Angel was here. It spun me."

"I think it spun us all."

**PART 2**

"I can't _believe_ that I have to retake the test!" Buffy cried out, leaving psych class later that week. As soon as she and Willow were out of earshot from Professor Walsh and Riley, she began ranting about the utter unfairness of the system and her lousy test grade. "I mean, it's so unfair! I have come to terms with my bad grade, why can't Professor Walsh? Isn't the whole point of college to be _away_ from the evil Nazi despot teacherly types who chase you around until you freaking _succeed_? What happened to 'oh, you'll love college – no one gives a crap about you there?'"

"Yeah, um, that _is _unfair," Willow said distractedly as she mentally flogged herself for her less-than-perfect ninetey-eight per cent.

"So, can I count on you for an all-night tutor session? The nonfat mochas are on me... since the caffeine tabs did diddly for my awakeness," Buffy offered.

"Uh-huh," Willow sighed.

"Will? Share my pain please?"

"Oh, sorry," Willow conceded, snapping out of her stupor. "Uh, I can't do it tonight. My Wicca group is having its annual Clambake Bacchanalia, and it usually goes pretty late, I hear. But I can give you my notes, and you can study on your own."

Buffy pouted, "Yes, because that worked so well the last time."

"No, it'll be better this time," Willow promised as the two girls walked out of the building, onto the sunny campus. "I take excellent notes..."

"Quelle shock," Buffy said, sardonically.

"...and I _paraphrase_ the book and lecture, so you can weed through, you know, the useless crap."

Buffy gave it a moment's thought. "Okay, it doesn't sound too bad. How many pages is it?"

"It's just a 50 kilobyte file."

"Excuse me?"

"I retype my notes and save them on my laptop. I'll just copy them to a disk, and you can peruse them in the computer lab in the library."

"Great," Buffy chirped.

"Now, about those mochas. You said they were on you?"

**PART 3**

"Whoa, check out the raging maenad," Buffy chuckled as Willow re-entered their dorm room.

"You think the blood is too much?" Willow asked. "I knew it! I told Mariah that it was too much, but she was all 'no no, they tear apart live pigs at a Bacchanalia, you have to be drenched in the blood of the innocent!'"

"Well, in that case, you look wonderful,"Buffy said, regarding her friend's red-spattered toga. "Very Bacchanal-y."

"Thanks. Now, about those notes, missy..."

Buffy groaned. "Do I hafta?"

"You heard Professor Walsh! You're behind as it is, and without retaking this test you'll be lucky to squeak by with a C at semester. You are way smarter than that, Buffy."

Willow sat down at her laptop. "It'll just take me three seconds to copy the file, and then it's all yours."

She booted up her machine, and then opened the file that contained her psych notes from the latest unit. She reached into a black box on her left-hand drawer and extracted a yellow floppy disk. She inserted it into the drive, and dragged the document into the floppy icon on her computer desktop.

A dialogue box popped up on the screen, "Error: disk is full."

"Disk is full? Jeez, what the heck is on here?" She double-clicked the icon, and two files appeared in the menu field: "1translitincant" and "2origrom." She double-clicked the latter, and a mess of seeming gibberish clouded the screen.

Peering over her shoulder, Buffy asked, "What the heck is that?"

Willow sighed. Barely above a whisper, Willow answered "It's that Romanian gypsy spell that we used to re-curse... I'd forgotten that I threw Miss Calendar's floppy disk in with all the others."

For the second time that week, Buffy found herself accidentally reminded of her darkest days with Angel.

Willow closed the file, then looked at the contents of the disk once more. "This is odd," she said.

"What's odd?"

"Well, the 2origrom file is much larger than the 1translitincant file. I wonder why that is," she answered absentmindedly, her attention focused on opening both files.

"What do the names mean?"

Willow turned and faced her friend. "Origrom was the filename that Miss Calendar gave to the original Romanian text, the actual penitent malediction that was used by the gypsy woman back in 1890, or whenever Angel was first cursed," Willow explained. "And translitincant was the filename for the transliterated incantation that Miss Calendar was able to produce with the translation program that she designed right before she died, the one that allowed us to begin the ritual in English."

"Ah," Buffy said, as she watched the gibberish text re-appear on-screen, and then an English one. Willow made each window smaller so that she could look at them side by side.

"In theory," Willow said, half to herself, "they should be the exact same size, since the transliteration file is more or less a direct translation of the Romanian. But it looks like the English version is way shorter, like it's missing some stuff."

"Missing some stuff?" Buffy asked, softly. "Like the curse is incomplete?"

Willow hesitated. She thought about what happens when words and phrases went missing from spells. Recently, when she had tried to curse Oz and Veruca, the simple not-saying of the final phrases of the spell caused the entire ritual to go completely kerfluey (also coupled with a withdrawal of her will to do them harm, but still). She had, in the last week or so, learned that the spell that Amy had performed when she turned herself into a rat had a clause that could have turned her back into regular old Amy after twenty-four hours, had she remembered to pray to Hecate "before thee, _for one cycle of the earth_, see the unclean thing crawl." But she forgot in her frightened haste, and now little Amy was in one hell of a bind. The spell she had intended, was, effectively, incomplete. She hated to tell Buffy so, but she had no choice. She was a terrible liar.

"Yeah, I guess so," she conceded. She tried to reassure Buffy with a smile, but her eyes only showed worry. "But that was over a year ago, and you spent all last year with him, and he was the same old Angel. Did you notice anything, I don't know... _off_ about him?"

Buffy thought about it as she began to pace the room. "Well, he did do that whole slap and tickle freakshow with Faith."

"But wasn't that your idea? I mean, you guys were just trying to get information about the Mayor's ascension, it's not like it was just for giggles."

"Yeah, but he was _awfully_ good at it. I mean, Oscar-worthy, Will. Even though I knew he was just acting, it was like everything I knew about Angel was gone, and all that was left was this creature who wanted to fuck my friend and torture me with sharp things. The room was cold, I felt empty – you don't understand what it was like."

"And he did knock Xander unconscious," Willow offered, though as soon as she said it, she was sorry.

"What if he was tapping into something that's just a little closer to the surface than before?"

"I guess it's possible that his soul is, maybe, uh, thinner than it was before, when the gypsy woman cursed him," Willow mused.

"Thinner," Buffy said, not quite a question.

"Yeah," Willow said, growing agitated. "Remember, vampires have a demon in them that makes them evil. Angel's natural state is to be evil, and his soul stops him. Think of the soul as something like a veil, like a piece of cloth that wraps around the demon in him and binds it. If the spell went incomplete, some detail was missing and it could be that it restored his soul, but instead of a soul made of a nice strong canvas, it gave us cheesecloth. It's more easily penetrated, easier for the evil to, um... leak."

Buffy stopped pacing. "Oh God," she whispered to herself. If the soul was more fragile, that meant that Angelus was more accessible, that the evil in him _was _closer to the surface than she had believed. That last year could have been a lie. It could mean all sorts of things. That could mean that he _had _liked sucking face with Faith and hanging out with the evil icky Mayor. It could mean that he _might_ have been capable of murder even with the soul, because plenty of humans with souls commit heinous crimes and then feel guilt... and then they do it again. It could mean that his love for her was not as genuine as she had believed and that the reason he'd gone to L.A. was because he just didn't want her. Come to think of it, if he loved her, _how_ could he have left town without saying goodbye? How could he have broken up with her in a sewer of all places?

And if the soul was thinner now, what could make it dissipate entirely? Could it be that all of the supposedly harmless smooching that they had done during that time had actually been unspeakably dangerous? How could she have coped if he had gone evil again? How could she have explained _that one_ to her friends?

Willow could partially read her friend's thoughts, though not through magic. She echoed Buffy's "Oh God," and crossed the room and picked up the telephone. "I'm calling L.A. We have to warn Cordelia that she might be dealing with..."

"No," Buffy interrupted. "Not until we know what it all means."

Willow set the phone down. "Research?"

"No, tonight, just go to your Bacchanalia. Tomorrow we'll see what Giles and his books have to say, and _then_ we can worry."

"Yeah," Willow agreed. "And even if we're right, the cheese cloth has held this long. It's not like Angel's a completely naked demon."

Buffy sincerely wished Willow had chosen a different metaphor. Now she was going to dream tonight about Angel in cheese cloth. And everyone knew how much she loved the taste of cheese...

**PART 4**

Buffy only performed marginally better on the psych re-take, and Professor Walsh had given her that look her mother gives her when she's "not angry, just disappointed." Really, the woman expected way too much from her. Once, she had handed in a stellar paper and been asked to lead a discussion group, and because of that, she's supposed to be some kind of psycho genius? That one time was a fluke!

"A fluke I tell you!" Buffy yelled, not at, but near Willow and Giles the following afternoon.

"I'm sure you'll do better on the final," Giles reassured her halfheartedly as he settled on his sofa with a cup of tea and a very old book entitled _La Divination Bohème._

Willow sighed. It had always been pretty clear that Buffy was not academically-inclined, and that had always been okay, 'cause she was _really_ good at saving the world. Frankly, at this point, Willow was a little tired of giving "you're smarter than that" pep talks to her evil-fighting friend, and was beyond sick of tutoring her super-preoccupied ears.

"Speaking of being good at saving the world," Willow said, "Giles and I have been working on the cheese cloth problem."

"We were speaking of that?" Buffy asked.

Giles began to speak in his usual cautious, British mumble. "Willow has shown me both the original Romanian penitence malediction alongside the anglicized transliteration, and I do believe we are looking at a discrepancy in the translation process."

"So does that mean that something was missing from the angle-sided transliterati, or does it mean that it was just translated wrong?" Buffy asked, a slight panic in her voice. Secretly, she had been hoping that Giles would be able to look at the files and miraculously tell her that everything was all right, that she had Willow had been fretting over nothing.

"I'm not sure yet, but I'm looking into it. I sent Xander to the bookstore down the street for a Romanian dictionary, but if it were as simple as all that, we wouldn't have needed a computer program to transliterate the spell in the first place."

"What do you mean?" Buffy asked.

"I mean that the gypsies spoke in Romanian for the most part, but their magicks were ancient and basically predated written language as we know it. You've seen the text, Buffy, it's all geometric symbols and codes that _themselves_ may signify some semblance of word structure in Romanian. But again, the codes predate the written language, so a direct translation can't always be made. The hard part is deciphering the symbology. The Romanian-to-English will be easy."

**PART 5**

In his usual short order, Giles had some news. The next night, as a matter of fact, after she came in from patrolling, Buffy found a handwritten message on her desk from Willow, saying that they had made a breakthrough, and that she should come to Giles'.

As usual, she arrived to find her three dearest friends (and Anya) poring over volumes of text, both electronic and of the paper variety, in an attempt to help her.

"What's the word?" she asked, dropping her jacked and purse by the door.

"Tea leaves," Anya responded. Then, "actually that's two words," she reminded herself.

"Tea leaves?"

"Yes," Giles answered. "We've been able to learn a great deal about the symbolism involved through this book, _La Divination Bohème._ It's about fortune-telling techniques of gypsies through the ages, chiefly the reading of tea leaves. They believed that through the patterns left behind in the cup by tea leaves, they could read the aura or future aura of the drinker."

"And the patterns they recognized as important were in the forms of sybols similar to the ones in the original text that Miss Calendar left on this disk," Willow said from her corner seat, not looking up from her laptop.

"Now Buffy, I may have some good news, but I don't want you to do anything rash," Giles warned. "I remind you that this is essentially a code language, which is mutable and ancient to begin with, and which structures pieces of words in Romanian. The symbology we have discovered is rooted in divination, which is not an exact form of physical magick, and we can't be certain of its connections to the rituals of the undead or any other type of ritualistic incantation. Moreover, the book in which we found it was written in French, not in Romanian or English, by a Russian. So absolutely _nothing_ is certain."

"Just tell me what you've found."

Willow brought her laptop to the coffee table, and Buffy parked herself in front of it, with Giles on her left and Xander on her right.

"Here's how the code works," Willow began to explain, from her position across the coffee table from Buffy. She pointed to a point on the screen. "Do you see this symbol? What does it look like to you?"

"It looks like one of those golf flags laid sideways," Buffy answered, her head cocked to the right.

"Okay," Willow conceded. "It's supposed to be a sundial."

Giles piped up now, "Clocks, in Bohemian gypsy divination, symbolize a kind of alchemy, the changing of something bad into something good, simply put."

"Like changing a vampire into a vampire with a soul," Anya explained unnecessarily.

"Okay, and what about this symbol?" Willow asked, pointing to an upside-down triangle made up of six small circles.

"It looks like a bunch of grapes," answered Buffy.

"Precisely," Giles said, excitedly. "And grapes symbolize wine."

"The Romanian word for wine is _vinul_. In their etymology, _vinul_ is related _vina_, which is the word for guilt," Xander explained.

Buffy looked at him, amazed.

"I was dictionary guy," he said, with a cute, proud smile.

"So grapes and guilt?" Buffy asked.

"This shows us how a vampire suddenly endowed with a soul would feel guilt for his past sins," added Anya, again, without really needing to.

"Anya, she's there. We're all there. You can stop with the expository commentary," Xander said.

Ignoring this, Giles continued, "So this is effectively the part of the incantation where the spellcaster specifies what is to happen: there is the alchemy of turning evil into good, and there is the element of guilt. Through this train of logic, we think we have found which part of the original text is missing in the transliteration."

"Okay, so..." Willow began.

**PART 6**

She turned the laptop to face her, and scrolled down to the section in question. She highlighted the area for Buffy's benefit, then turned it back to face Buffy, Giles and Xander.

Before Willow's finger could find the symbol, Xander started to giggle. Willow shot him an annoyed expression, then asked Buffy to identify the image.

"Well," Buffy answered, twisting her face up. "It kind of looks like a boob."

"That's exactly what it is," Willow told her.

Xander giggled like a schoolboy.

"Uh, Beavis, can you tell us the Romanian word for breast, please?" Willow asked him, rolling her eyes.

Still smiling goofily, he answered, "_Sfarc_ is the word. And I believe it translates to 'teat'." He said the last word with undue emphasis. Even Anya was doing some eye-rolling at his inappropriateness now.

"Etymology?" Anya asked, bored now.

"Etymology, right," Xander said, clearing his throat. "_Sfarc_ is etymologically related to _sfarai_, to sputter,_ sfarama_, to shatter, _sfarseal,_ exhaustion and most importantly, _sfarsit_, to finish."

"Those are all words related to something ending," Buffy said, "Okay, go on."

"The next one is this symbol," Willow pointed out.

"Looks like a harp of some kind," Buffy said, her frown becoming more and more intense.

"Harps, in their divination, symbolize romance," Giles explained.

"The word for romance in Romanian," Xander said, flipping through the pages, "is _idila._ Now, _idila_ is, apparently, the noun form, but _idilic_ is the adjective counterpart, and it means, not surprisingly, idyllic."

"Or perfect or flawless," Anya finished.

"Okay okay," said Willow excitedly. "Here we go. What is this?" she asked, pointing to another symbol on the screen.

"It's a cross, isn't it?"

"Yes, and a cross means shelter in their divination symbology, not balance in nature, as it does is most pagan cultures. This is where it gets tricky," Giles explained, as he cleaned his glasses on with his shirttail.

"Xander! Tell her the word for shelter in Romanian," Willow said, barely able to contain her excitement.

"It is, let me see here... _feri._"

"Okay okay, and these?" Willow began again. Again, she pointed to the screen, but this time with two fingers.

"One is a tree, and the other is an upside-down Q," Buffy answered.

"One is a tree, yes," Gile said, "and we think the other is a cherry."

"Cherry tree in Romanian is _cire_."

Everyone went silent, and looked at Buffy expectantly, as though she were expected to draw some amazing conclusion from this.

She was silent back. And confused. A baited breath hung in the air, and there was nervous expectation, an explosion waiting just on the other side of everyone's tight smile.

Anya was the first to speak. "You have to tell her about _fericire_, dumbasses!"

"Oh! Yes of course," Giles fluttered. "_Fericire _is the all-encompassing Romanian word for enjoyment, or anything, er, pleasurable."

"So these four symbols..." Buffy began, weakly, pointing at the screen.

"The breast, the harp, the tree and the upside-down Q..." Willow named, ticking on her fingers.

"Ending... idyllic... enjoyment..."

"It means that the curse is broken when the cursee has a moment of perfect happiness," Anya announced. "Isn't that fantastic?"

Buffy looked at her, without really seeing.

Again, everyone fell silent.

Buffy was the one to break the silence this time. Just above a whisper, she said, "And this is the part that was left _out_ of the spell?"

"Yes," Giles whispered.

"So it's not the cheese cloth!" blurted Willow, immediately regretting it.

"Are you sure?" Buffy asked Giles.

"Not remotely. You see our process of translation. You can also see why it looks like pure gibberish to traditional magical symbologists and why Jenny couldn't find anyone to decipher it. As I said, divination isn't considered a pure magical art, and there's great discord in the mystical world over whether gypsies are reliable diviners in the first place – or reliable magicians for that matter. My books are muttled, my information is based on..."

"Thank you, Giles," Buffy said, more as a way of cutting him off than as a true expression of gratitude. She was staring straight ahead, her brain both shut-off and noisy with every thought she has ever had since meeting Angel in that alley three years before.

Dark and mysterious. Gorgeous. Evil. No wait, good. Enigmatic and playing hard-to-get. Lustful. Pleasurable. Pure evil. Villainous, murderous, hell-bound. Miraculous, feral. Weak, strong. Gorgeous. Lustful, tortured, forbidden. _Forbidden_.

But if Giles and the gang were right...

"Buffy, if I'm right," Giles continued. "And this is _if_... it means that the clause that robs Angel of his soul when he experiences perfect happiness does not apply anymore. Willow performed the incantation as it appeared on the transliteration that Jenny's computer program produced, and the, er, loophole, as it were, was simply missing. All I can think is that she had not finished with the programming, or what-have-you, had not gotten to this part of the text before she was killed, and we simply overlooked..."

Giles continued to speak, but Buffy heard nothing.

She was numb. This was not the thing she most wanted in the world, but it might have been a close second. To be free to love Angel the way they both deserved, even if it still meant that he was immortal and she was not, it was like stumbling upon a pot of gold at the end of a very black, vermin-infested rainbow. They would still have to deal with her growing old and his inevitable enduring youth, the major risks involved in him being a Champion and her being a Slayer, the distance between them, the 230-year age gap, and his endless guilt and quest for redemption, but the biggest roadblock seemed to be gone. Right now, that one moment of happiness, to Buffy, was worth all the rest of the unavoidable debris.

"Remember Buffy," she heard Giles warn, as Angel had the year before. "Sometimes the very that seems to be a great gift can turn out to be a curse in and of itself."

She grabbed her coat and purse.

"Where are you going?" Xander asked, as if he didn't already know.

"To L.A. I'm going to find a little perfect happiness."


	2. Chapter 2

I have begun a sequel to What Was Left Unsaid, and decide to write and post it as a completely separate entity.

It is called Upgrade, and is posted under stories about "Angel," the series. Only chapter 1 is currently available.


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